Applying PMO Measuring: Benchmarking Ourselves

Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.

  PMO  

The last column in this series proposed a framework for measuring PMO success, based upon a model PMO whose role was primarily one of centralized tracking, process definition, and training, coaching and mentoring. It proposed specific measures that could be used to help to demonstrate the success of a PMO, based upon the specific behaviors that were being look for as a result of implementing the PMO.

While definition of measures is an important and essential contributor to demonstrating overall PMO success (and one that only 27 percent of PMOs actually define, according to recent research conducted by my company), the measures themselves can only take you so far. In the final analysis, it's not the measures you use but what you do with them that counts. Even if you are one of those select few PMOs that have defined success criteria (and if you are following this series, you should be!) the next question you should expect from your management team if they are halfway awake is, "So what?"

Defining how you measure success is only one dimension, and while it is necessary it is not sufficient. The next step and more important step is to define what success looks like using the measures. In other words, if part of the dimension of success for your PMO is "reduction in time of status report preparation," then what is a reasonable target for performance of that measure?…

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